


i'll be back (though it takes forever)

by amosanguis



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Brief Violence, Character Study, Gen, Speeches, Tarsus IV, admiral komack is a dick, title from a song, yes another one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-23
Updated: 2020-02-23
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:41:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22853422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amosanguis/pseuds/amosanguis
Summary: “This is the part where I bring us to a moment of silence,” Jim says. Except then he looks down and away from the scrolling words in front of him. “But I’m not going to do that.”Alternatively, Jim hates silence.
Relationships: James T. Kirk & Leonard "Bones" McCoy, James T. Kirk & Spock
Comments: 8
Kudos: 287





	i'll be back (though it takes forever)

**Author's Note:**

> \--Title from "Beyond Antares" because I am weak for anything Uhura sings.  
> \--This fic is a blend of _Collision Course_ by William Shatner and the Reeves-Stevenses, TOS and AOS, as well as my own headcanons.  
> \--Has only been given a cursory edit, please forgive any mistakes or kindly point them out.

-z-

Jim looks out over the crowd, his eyes inevitably returning to the front row – the survivor’s row, all of them dressed in black, all of them around his own age.

After all, it was harder for the adults to survive what happened.

They couldn’t hide as well.

“This is the part where I bring us to a moment of silence,” Jim says. Except then he looks down and away from the scrolling words in front of him. “But I’m not going to do that.”

Out of his peripheral, Jim can see Admiral Komack smirk – obviously thinking, _Gotcha. I’m gonna fire you this time, Kirk._

Jim keeps his eyes on that row of black. At those achingly familiar faces.

“I think we’ve had enough of the silence.”

The admiral stops smirking.

“I was thirteen when—”

-x-

Jim is thirteen years old when he drives Frank’s car off a cliff – trying to drive out from a dead man’s shadow, trying to drive out of Sam’s leaving, trying to drive out of Winona’s years-long absences, trying to drive out of the all-consuming silence of a home that was only ever broken by drunken rage.

Jim is thirteen-and-a-half when he lands on Tarsus and hears the singing trees for the first time.

They’re the principle export for Tarsus, bearing a sweet fruit that was black with red spots – the redder the spots, the sweeter the fruit; and the way the leaves processed the sunlight made the trees sing a low, humming song that never really stopped and could be heard for miles – even in the darkest hours, just before the dawn, Jim could hear the trees if he closed his eyes and listened hard enough.

Jim’s aunts run an orchard of these singing trees on one side of the farm, and a stable on the other side. None of the horses actually belong to Jim’s family, but he’s allowed to ride one or two of them whenever they’re not working in their owners’ fields.

Jim is fourteen and he’s not as angry as he used to be – there’s nothing to escape from here. If people know who he is, they keep it to themselves.

Jim is fourteen-and-a-quarter when his aunts kiss him on the cheek and tell him to mind the farm, tell him that they’ll be back in a few months – that there’s a family member on another planet who’s nearing their end and they need to see them through it. Jim shoos them off and tells them that he’ll be fine, that they’ll be putting him in a cabin with some younger kids who don’t have anyone to mind them. His aunts tell him they’re proud of him; Jim won’t see them again for another decade.

Days pass and Jim moves into his cabin of youngsters, ready and willing to commit to their care as he leads them on excursions through the forests that always end in the orchard of his singing trees.

Jim is fourteen-and-half when the blight starts.

The trees are the first to go and Jim’s world is silent once more.

-x-

“It was October 3rd,” Jim says, he’s moved to the side of the podium now and he’s looking only at those ghosts in black and none of the rest of the crowd matters, “do y’all remember that day? The day the trees stopped singing?”

One of the men reaches up and wipes surreptitiously at the corner of his eye.

“I do,” Jim says, “like it was just this morning that I woke up and noticed the silence.”

-x-

The adults are as silent as the trees.

They talk, of course, but they talk in wide circles, going ‘round and ‘round and ‘round what’s really happening. They don’t talk about the dead trees nor the dead grains nor the dying animals. Farmers come and get their horses from Jim’s stables and Jim never sees the horses again, and the farmers never meet his eye when he asks after them.

Jim tries to get ahold of his aunts, but there’s something blocking the signal – something that Jim can’t figure out (later, afterwards, he vows never to let it happen again and, in the span of a few weeks, becomes an expert in communications and transmission signals and all related theories).

When the rolls go up, Jim’s name isn’t on any of them.

But then another boy Jim’s age, Griffyn, someone Jim had once counted a friend, holds out a red bandana and a phaser and says, “That can change, Jimmy.”

Jim grabs his kids and he runs and he hides them in the forest – he wears the bandana and carries the phaser and he tells the other boy that it’s done and, when Kodos himself puts his hand on Jim’s shoulder, says, “Well done, boy,” Jim doesn’t flinch. He’s silent.

Jim squirrels away as much food as he can without getting caught.

Then he runs again.

He flees to the forest and he finds his kids. He passes out the food (it’s not enough, it’ll never be enough) and tells them they have to stay here, that they have to be quiet, that any noise and the guards will come and they’ll have bandanas and phasers and they won’t ask any questions.

-x-

Jim makes eye contact with one of the women and she gives him a sad smile and he wishes they could’ve talked before he went up to this podium that’s now holding almost all of his weight.

“Sold,” he says to her, and only to her, the gathered crowd in that moment is simply eavesdropping on the two of them, “for a piece of stale bread and a ten-year old can of baked beans. How fickle loyalties are when that’s all that stands between you and starvation. But there was no time to be angry, was there? Not when you have to be quiet.”

-x-

They talk only in whispers and hand gestures, crying only in whimpers when the hunger is too much, when not enough bugs had been caught that day.

Jim leads them from safe spot to safe spot under the cover of darkness, when there’s no light and the guards are too busy drinking away the last of the stores, laughing raucously and giving away their locations – and Jim and his children avoid them easily.

Jim whispers songs, when they’re all lying together, huddled together for warmth as winter well and truly settles around them; sometimes fumbling the lyrics on purpose so the little ones can correct him. They sing about the falling of the London Bridge and the ring around the rosie; and then one of the girls, Dolly, teaches them a new song – a song about a lunar flower and a heart’s love somewhere beyond Antares.

“My mom sings it—

“My mom _used_ to sing it—

“—she _used_ to sing it to my dad. And he’d blush and laugh. They were fun that way.”

Jim wraps his arms around her and whispers, “It’s a beautiful song, Dolly. Let’s go through it again?”

They’ve circled the forest wide three times over two weeks before Jim leads them back towards his dead orchard.

In the silence, Jim has no problem hearing Griffyn’s laughter.

Then, as the wind turns, Jim smells smoke.

-x-

“Dead trees burn easily,” Jim says. “My kids and I watched the fire spread over the orchard, then it jumped the line and it started on the town. It took a few houses, then the high school stadium.”

Jim doesn’t feel much even now as he thinks back on it. He had loved those trees and that orchard, their songs had brought him peace when he’d known none, but he’d come to accept their loss long before the fire. He’d had to. There’d been young mouths to feed and young eyes to keep averted and young minds to keep distracted.

“We were so busy watching the fire—”

-x-

The phaser fire burns his arm and hits him with enough force to spin him around, but he doesn’t call out – weeks of keeping quiet were a hard habit to break.

Jim doesn’t think – he just forces himself back to his feet and he grabs his smallest, Hank, and pushes the others out in front of him and he runs. Dirt flies up at his feet, the energy of the blasts burning his ankles. He doesn’t know what he was thinking coming back here. There was nothing left for them in town and he should’ve known—

The firing stops.

Jim and his kids don’t slow down.

The next day, Jim remembers now why they went back – he had wanted to see if help had arrived yet, and it obviously hadn’t.

This time, Jim goes in alone.

He gets as close as he dares, under the cover of darkness, and looks around – no food, no help. Then he slips away back into the forest, catching whatever bug as he can as he goes.

He checks again the next day and the day after that.

Jim’s wound starts to fester – his body not healthy enough to stave off infection – but he ignores the pain and hides it as best he can from the smallest kids. The older ones do what they can for Jim – they make more and more of the bug runs. But, really, there’s only so much the water from small brook they’ve all been drinking from can do as Jim tries to keep it clean.

 _This is it_ , Jim thinks _, this is how I’m gonna die. Shot by some asshole._

But Jim is determined and before the fever gets bad like he knows it will, Jim forces himself to his feet and he takes the hand of his quietest kid, Tommy, and together they go back into town. There _had_ to be something. There _had_ to be.

A few of the others walk with them part of the way, singing whisper-soft about the stars and love beyond Antares. Of all the songs they’ve sang, it’s the one that they sing the most and Jim finds it so amusing – these kids who may not truly understand the words or the context of the lyrics they’re singing in voices just barely loud enough to be heard.

“One day,” Jim whispers, when they reach the point where the others will break off so Jim and Tommy can go forward, alone, “we’re all gonna sing that song loud.”

They all smile and nod and Jim takes Tommy’s hand and they turn once more towards the town.

Griffyn corners them in the burned out remains of the stadium, Tommy’s hurt and whimpering with his hands over an eye, and just before Griffyn can blow Jim’s head off, goddamned _Starfleet_ arrives – beautiful red shirts burning bright as blood against the black char of the bleachers.

“Kid, are you alright?” one of them asks, his adult’s eyes wide as he rushes to Jim’s side, as he takes Jim in – malnourished and pale and sweating, stinking of filth and a rotting wound – as another rushes towards Tommy.

And days of fear and silence and anxiety erupt out of Jim – and he screams at the officer and he punches at him and he’s still screaming until there’s nothing left in his lungs and he falls to his knees and passes out.

By the time Jim wakes up, Starfleet has found his kids and everyone’s in the Medical Bay of a starship.

Jim keeps his eyes closed as he listens to the doctors and nurses bustling around, talking in low voices. The sound of it is almost grating – it’s the most noise for this long that Jim’s heard in weeks – but he’s also never been more thankful – it was over, this was all over, and Jim never wants to hear silence again.

-x-

Jim hangs his head, gathers himself, before he looks once more to the row of black.

“Moments of silence,” he says, “they have no place on Tarsus. This planet has had enough of them. If we’re quiet, the dead will think we’ve joined them.”

Jim turns then and he starts to walk away, when the woman, the one he had spoken to directly earlier, Dolly, rushes to stand and she starts to sing—

“ _The skies are green and glowing—_ ”

And next to her, the man who’d wiped his eyes, Hank, he stands and he joins her—

“ _Where my heart is, where my heart is; where the scented lunar flower is blooming: somewhere, beyond the stars:—"_

Tommy stands, his face pale against the black of his eye patch, belts out—

 _“—beyond Antares_.”

And Jim is off the stage and he has them in his arms.

He thought they’d been lost to each other forever – the years after Tarsus, Jim had been _angry_ and filled with a loathing that made him do everything he could to fight or fuck it out, to forget it all happened.

But then Pike and Starfleet, then Bones and Spock ( _god,_ Spock) and everything with Khan, then the start of their five-year mission and then, just two weeks ago, a message from Admiral Komack wanting Jim and the Enterprise to make an appearance at the 20th year anniversary remembrance ceremony to be held on Tarsus itself.

Bones had been adamant that Jim not put himself through it – something about reliving trauma – but Jim knows how to read between the lines of an order, and Komack clearly expected Jim to think an assignment like this beneath the _Enterprise_ and had been expecting Jim to protest. Instead, Jim put his head down and he told Bones that they were going as he typed out a message to Komack to acknowledge the order.

(Jim makes sure to tell Spock exactly what Tarsus means for Jim.

“Y’know,” Jim says, shrugging, “just in case I start having a panic attack or something, you can nerve-pinch me and put me out of my misery.”

Spock blinks. “I believe the appropriate response would be to call on Dr. McCoy, captain.”

“No. No, you should definitely nerve-pinch me.”

Spock—well, he doesn’t quite _sigh_ , but it’s a near thing. “As you wish, Jim.”)

The speech was planned – it was going to be short and sweet and to the point. Jim, unfortunately, has had enough experience in delivering uplifting speeches in the wake of tragedy. This was just another tragedy (except it wasn’t and Jim’s not very good at lying to himself).

What _wasn’t_ planned, was outing himself as one of those survivors. But Jim’s never been able to contain himself around unfounded arrogance – and something about Komack just makes Jim want to act out in ways that are maybe-definitely a bit petty.

Or.

Or maybe it was just being back on Tarsus. Jim had beamed down to the planet with Spock and Bones at his side and the first thing that had struck him was that, even after twenty years, the trees were still silent. It had been jarring. And when Jim had gotten to the part of his speech for the moment of silence, he hadn’t been able to do it.

And maybe he was selfish – taking this moment to honor those lost in a massacre and making it about himself, but there’s only _one_ row of people wearing black. Ten years ago, Jim knows from news articles, there’d been at least six rows. Every year, the number of survivors decreases – and it’s not age taking them.

Maybe if more of them see that Jim’s made it – he’s the captain of a starship now and he has it on good authority that he’s a bona fide hero and everything – maybe it can give some of them their own hope.

Jim looks at Dolly and Hank and Tommy – faces so familiar now that he’s close and paying attention, and not drowning in anxiety and memory, that he can’t believe he ever missed them – and they’re all crying and holding onto each other. They’re talking all at once – apologizing for the lost years and comms written but never sent.

Then they’re introducing him to the other survivors.

Hank introduces Jim to a young man named Kevin Riley, only twenty-three and just graduated from Starfleet Academy who tells Jim that he’s just received orders for the _Enterprise_ and Jim shakes his hand and says, “I look forward to having you aboard, ensign.”

The rest of the day and the night passes, the survivors talking loud – letting the dead know they won’t be joining them just yet. Then the moon rises and Jim lifts his glass and he and his children sing, almost shout their song about lunar flowers and stars and love beyond Antares.

-z-

End.


End file.
